Fearing That Inmates Have Weapon, State Squad Scours Pontiac

September 07, 1996|By Gary Marx, Tribune Staff Writer.

As many as 100 tactical squad officers were dispatched to the Pontiac Correctional Center Friday after officials received a tip that a weapon had been smuggled into the maximum-security facility for possible use by gang members against a correctional officer.

Brian Fairchild, spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, refused to say what type of weapon was specified in the tip or identify the gang suspected of plotting the attack. But he said authorities believe the unrest is connected to the January killing of inmate Florencio Pecina by a Pontiac guard.

"They've (the gang) said that they'll get anybody they can," Fairchild said. "This is a tense, life or death situation."

Pecina, 31, a member of the Latin Kings who was serving a 45-year sentence for the 1982 murder of a Romeoville man, was shot and killed on Jan. 12 by a prison guard in a skirmish in which Pecina and two inmates reportedly resisted attempts by guards to confiscate a weapon.

"Three for one! Three for one!," Pontiac inmates chanted after Pecina was killed. The message was clear: For every one inmate who is killed, three correctional employees will have to die.

In an attempt to ease tensions, prison officials moved Pecina's brother, Steven, 43, on Jan. 23 from the Downstate Menard Correctional Center to the Joliet Correctional Center so that he could be closer to his family, other inmates say. The Pecina brothers were convicted in the same case.

But on Feb. 10, prison officials at Menard say an alleged Latin King hit on a officer in retaliation for Pecina's death was averted because the inmate, who was ordered to carry out the attack instead turned himself in to prison authorities.

Officials subsequently found 15 homemade knives in the inmate's cell, and he told authorities that Latin King leaders, including Pedro Rey, had ordered him to kill a corrections officer. Rey has since been transferred to a maximum-security prison in Kansas.

Rey, 41, who is serving a 25-year sentence for armed robbery, has denied the allegation. "I'm no angel. There is a lot of negative in me. But there was no plot to hit an officer," he said in a recent interview.

Less than two weeks after the February incident, Pontiac guard Robert Murphy was attacked while taking handcuffed inmate Toby Phillips from the shower area. According to court documents, Phillips pulled a knife from his shampoo bottle, freed his hands with a key given him by another inmate, and repeatedly stabbed Murphy in the throat and chest.

Murphy survived the Feb. 20 attack, which Phillips said he committed in retaliation for Pecina's death. "Yeah, I was trying to kill him," said Phillips, 34, who pleaded guilty to the attack and was given an 80-year sentence. "To me, it was worth it. . . ."

Fairchild said the tactical squad members, who dress in orange jumpsuits and carry wooden batons and Mace, began their search for the smuggled weapon at Pontiac early Friday night. He said their effort could go on for many hours.

Last weekend, about 30 Pontiac inmates ripped out plumbing, lit fires and tore through cell walls to protest a new telephone system that limits the number and length of telephone calls and the elimination of a privilege that allowed them to mail three free letters a week.